The acquisition of L3 French present simple and present progressive by adult L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English

Abstract

Abstract The study examines the acquisition of L3 French present form by advanced L2 English learners of L1 Chinese within the framework of the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) of Rothman (2011) and the Interpretability Hypothesis of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (Tsimpli, Ianthi-maria & Maria Dimitrakopoulou. 2007. The Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23. 215–242. The meaning-form distinction of the present form in relation to habitual and event-in-progress interpretations varies between French, English, and Chinese, but is constrained by the presence/absence of tense and agreement features. Thirty-two adult L1 Chinese speakers of high proficiency L2 English/low proficiency L3 French and thirty adult L1 Chinese speakers of low proficiency L2 English together with a native English control group and a French control group were invited to take part in an acceptability judgement test. The results provide partial support to the TPM, which posits that the perceived typological similarity between L3 and the previously acquired languages conditions transfer in L3 initial state. The findings are, instead, more consistent with the Interpretability Hypothesis, which assumes the inaccessibility of uninterpretable syntactic features in subsequent language acquisition. What remain available in adult multilingual acquisition are interpretable syntactic features, computational devices, and other aspects of Universal Grammar (UG).